FOSS4G NA 2024

The Sensor Tasking API (STAPI) Specification
09-11, 15:30–16:00 (America/Chicago), Grand C

Satellite Tasking (i.e., ordering data from the future) remains non-standard and challenging. We’re leading an effort to develop a community standard for tasking and ordering. This presentation covers the current status, future plans, and demonstrates the API.


In the last decade hundreds of satellites have been launched, and dozens of startup companies have launched taskable earth observation satellites. While this has led to incredible opportunities to leverage multiple sensors and sensor modalities, the massive increase of data has also created challenges in data management, discovery, and usage. The STAC specification was an important step forward in exposing data to users in a standard way, however the process of actually tasking satellites is still very much non-standard. Each data provider exposes a unique API, if at all. Some data aggregators have created a single tasking API that proxies and translates to multiple data provider APIs, but this is still non-standard, and proprietary.

Element 84 has been leading an effort to create a community standard API around how users order future data and how providers respond to those requests. Working with government groups, commercial satellite operators, and data integrators, we have hosted working sprints to develop a specification and open-source tooling to make it easier for more users to order and leverage this data. This year we ran our third tasking sprint in Berlin, working on implementations, documentation, and advanced the spec. This talk will cover the current status of the community tasking API specification, future plans, and a demonstration of how to use the API to order data.

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